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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/29509743">But the sky is always bluer</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/naivesilver/pseuds/naivesilver'>naivesilver</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Sonic the Hedgehog (2020), Sonic the Hedgehog - All Media Types</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Baking, Family Fluff, Fluff, Gen, Stay Home With Sonic Charity Fanzine</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-02-17</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-02-17</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-16 02:34:01</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,010</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/29509743</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/naivesilver/pseuds/naivesilver</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Perhaps, Maddie wonders as she pulls their third cake of the week out of the oven, they really do have a baking problem.</i>
</p>
<p>Life in quarantine at the Wachowskis' presents some unique challenges.</p>
<p>(Written for the Stay Home With Sonic Zine 2020)</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Sonic the Hedgehog &amp; Maddie Wachowski</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>5</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>65</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>But the sky is always bluer</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Hello! As you might have guessed from the summary, this fic was written as part of the charity zine Stay Home With Sonic. It was a wonderful experience, and I'm grateful to all mods and to the rest of the zine's commitee for giving us the chance to do something good during this pandemic. All profits have been donated to Doctors Without Borders.<br/>I have finally been granted permission to post my work in full, as have the rest of my colleagues - you can find all of their amazing artworks and fanfics on the zine's Tumblr blog <a href="https://stayhomesonic.tumblr.com/">here</a></p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Perhaps, Maddie wonders as she pulls their third cake of the week out of the oven, they really do have a baking problem.</p>
<p>Not that the Wachowskis are the only ones dealing with that sort of issue. She could swear half the messages she gets on the moms’ group chat are pictures of dainty cupcakes and sweet treats, and so much homemade bread it’s no wonder the local shops have run out of flour several times.</p>
<p>(It’s still somewhat of a shock - if someone had told her, just a year ago, that one day she’d be trading frustrated texts about her adopted alien child with other moms, she’d have wondered about their mental stability. And yet here she is, her phone bursting with notifications about online class homework and indoor activities for restless kids.</p>
<p>Not that she’s mad at how things turned out. Sonic’s worth it, and she’s sure he considers her his mom, even though he only ever calls her <em>Maddie</em> because he’s still working through his owl-mother-related issues.)</p>
<p>Now, Maddie won’t pretend that her creations are anywhere as pretty as those other families’, with their spotlessly, unbelievably clean kitchens in the background. There’s a reason why she paid someone else to make Tom’s San Francisco congratulatory cake: her cakes tend to look funny even when they’re not lathered with frosting to cover some burnt spots.</p>
<p>They’re good, though. Sonic loves stuffing his face with them, and he loves helping, too, while Ozzy wags his tail and tries to stick his nose in any unattended mixing bowl. And Tom appreciates having something sweet packed with his lunch, now that the bakery he gets his donuts from has closed because of the lockdown.</p>
<p>Speaking of Tom – the grocery bags he’s brought in last night are still on the floor, threatening to make her trip. She’d blame him, but in truth they both tend to put off checking his quarantine purchases for as long as they can, dreading the sorry state they’ll most certainly be in. Anything that reaches their house has survived the buying frenzy that has overtaken whole country, since Tom’s always the last one to enter the supermarket: nowadays, his job consists mostly in reminding people to keep their distance and prevent them from starting a fight over the last dose of yeast.</p>
<p>This time’s no exception: the bananas he’s bought are so thoroughly battered it’s a miracle they’re still in one piece. She might have to make some banana bread next, before they rot for good.</p>
<p>Maddie sighs, waving the thought away. She can’t be thinking about baking again <em>already</em>. She doesn’t even know if the experiment currently cooling down on the counter has paid off.</p>
<p>Well, there’s no going around it. She’ll need her best taster to tell her if they’ve done a good job.</p>
<p>“Sonic?” She calls out. “Can you come here a second?”</p>
<p>No answer. No noise, either, and that is definitely weird – the kid’s got many talents, but the ability to entertain himself quietly is <em>not</em> one of those.</p>
<p>Maddie makes her way to the living room, expecting to find him engrossed in a game or something of the like, comfortably half-sprawled on Ozzy. The golden retriever is, thankfully, as patient with Sonic as he was from the very beginning with Jojo: he lets himself be hugged and roped into games without so much as a complaint, and he curls at the foot of the young hedgehog’s bed at night, even though the kid kicks and twitches in his sleep.</p>
<p>(Tom pretends to be annoyed by the latest development – it ruins years of boundaries they’ve tried to set for their dog, he says. But the sight of the two of them snoring softly in unison is irresistible, and having to wash dog hairs off the bedcovers is a small price to pay, if it means Sonic can sleep more easily through the night.)</p>
<p>Still, she doesn’t see hide nor hair of either hedgehog or dog. Not that long ago, back when Sonic was still prone to running off when he got overwhelmed by his new life, Maddie would have been worried that they might have snuck out. But the kid knows better than to break quarantine, and she knows better than to doubt him, now. He’d never speed away with the risk of losing Ozzy somewhere.</p>
<p>That means they must be somewhere inside. It’s a less reassuring prospect that it might seem - she never thought so much trouble could be brewed inside a single house until she had a young boy bounding through her rooms. It’s a small relief that Jojo is not allowed to visit, even though Maddie misses her a lot. Her and Sonic’s combined forces are enough to drive Rachel to hysterics.</p>
<p>There doesn’t seem to be a trail of destruction she has to follow to find Sonic, however. The only sign of disturbance is a dresser in one of the upstairs rooms, its drawers pulled out and clearly rummaged through. It’s unlikely that there might have been anything dangerous inside, though, since it’s just the place where they stash all of the arts and crafts stuff that has somehow accumulated throughout the years, so Maddie leaves it be.</p>
<p>Instead, she turns to the trap door to the attic, the only room she’s yet to check.</p>
<p>The latch is closed, the ladder pulled up all the way, but she can just make out the sound of Sonic speaking through it. That’s not uncommon: the kid chatters to himself from sunrise to sunset. It’s an annoying habit, at times, but most certainly one that he picked during the years he spent alone, to keep himself company.</p>
<p>Maddie’s glad that that’s not the case anymore. It’d be better if there were no lockdown involved, but at least they’ve taken Sonic in right on time and he’s spending it in the house, with his own room and his own family. She can’t imagine how hard it’d be for him to be stuck in a cave alone, with only half a clue of what might be going on in the world.</p>
<p>Still, eavesdropping’s probably not the politest thing to do, and she <em>does</em> have a cake for him to try, so she leans up and knocks on the trap door. “You up there, kid?”</p>
<p>Instantly, the rambling above her head stops. Seconds tick by with no answer, and Maddie’s about to knock again when Sonic’s voice travels down again. “Yeah, come in.”</p>
<p>There’s just a hint of hesitation in those four words, but it sends a spike of concern through her nonetheless. She’s pulled down the ladder and started climbing up before she’s even aware of it, though her face is schooled into what she hopes is a calm and collected expression.</p>
<p>Mom instinct override, Tom would call it, probably before getting smacked in the face with a throw pillow.</p>
<p>“You busy?” She asks, carefully peering inside. “Cake’s ready if you want to…”</p>
<p>She trails off, uncertain.</p>
<p>She’d expected, given his reaction, to be intruding in something she wasn’t really meant to see. An embarrassing sign of his impending teenage years, perhaps, or just one of the myriads of little things Sonic used to do back in the cave and is still reluctant to show them. Right before Maddie stepped on the ladder she was ready to turn around and leave, if that was the case, because while she and Tom would like him to open up more, they have agreed on not forcing him out of his comfort zone too often yet.</p>
<p>What she finds is, instead, what looks like a makeshift painting workshop.</p>
<p>The clinical side of her, the one who’s grown used to having to disinfect door handles, notices the details first. Sonic’s spread old newspapers on the floor before starting on his project, which was a pretty good call, but there’s paint smeared on his arms and quills, and that’s going to be hell to get out of hedgehog fur. Dog fur, too, since the boy’s sitting cross-legged on the floor with Ozzy’s head in his lap, no doubt getting in the way of both the brush and any stray drops of colour flying off it.</p>
<p>Only afterwards she registers the vaguely guilty expression on Sonic’s face and looks down at the painting. It seems innocuous enough, a half-finished rainbow done in bright colours, but from the way he acts one would think she’s caught him holding a live snake.</p>
<p>“Hey” Maddie begins, stepping closer with a tentative smile on her face. “What are you guys doing up here?”</p>
<p>“Uh…” Sonic shifts uncomfortably in place, eyes darting from her to the painting. “Nothing. Not much. Just- just messing around.”</p>
<p>His demeanour is increasingly more troubling. Worse still, it’s not entirely unfamiliar either. It has something of the way he behaved in the first days after they got rid of Robotnik, the lonely, somewhat feral kid coming to terms with that peculiar middle-school-boy need to show off.</p>
<p>Sonic is, undoubtedly, fast enough that he could have hidden the drawing before she’d even pulled down the ladder. That he’s stayed where he was – and he <em>has</em>, if only because Ozzy would not look so supremely unbothered if it had been otherwise – means that he wants her to see it, and yet he’s still worrying about her reaction, as if Maddie were likely to judge him for any hobby that doesn’t involve getting in the way of mad scientists.</p>
<p>It breaks her just a little that he still doesn’t fully trust her, and yet that’s what she signed up for when she and Tom took him in, previous trauma and all. At this point all she can do is try and prove him wrong, so she sits on her haunches and gives the drawing a critical once over, like she used to do with Jojo’s crayon scribbles. “This looks great, kid. How’d you come up with it?”</p>
<p>Sonic seems unconvinced by her earnestness, scratching behind his ear with the tip of the brush and flicking more paint drops around. “Yeeeeah, I just…Some people from school did the same thing with their siblings so I thought it would be fun to just, you know, try it out.”</p>
<p>She knows what he means. She saw a few rainbows taped on their neighbours’ windows and plastered all over the news, now that she thinks about it, all decorated with variations of “Everything’s going to be okay”. It’s one of those heart-warming quarantine trends that the USA inherited from overseas, where the pandemic hit way earlier.</p>
<p>And <em>of course</em> Sonic would pick up what he’s seen other kids do and try his hand at it in secret – he’s been doing it his whole life. He probably thinks it’s embarrassing, that it makes him look uncool, but to Maddie he’s never looked more his age, excited as he is about something that might break the lockdown monotony.</p>
<p>He’s still looking as though he were expecting a rebuke, but Maddie’s face softens. She lowers herself down to sit next to him, careful not to jostle either Ozzy or the masterpiece in the making.</p>
<p>“It’s awesome, Sonic” she tells him, draping an arm over his shoulders. “Do you think you can do one for the clinic as well? I’d like to hang it on the front door. Might make some people feel better when they bring their pets in.”</p>
<p>Sonic searches her face for any sign that she might be making fun of him, but she’s only smiling, wide and sincere. He grins in response, hesitant at first and then way more confident, and gives her a thumbs up. “Yeah, sure! I’m on it!”</p>
<p>And if he cuddles up against her as he goes back to his work, well, Maddie is not about to draw any attention to <em>that</em>. Certainly not when she’s enjoying it as well, having her boy right there, safe and sound and happy in her arms even though the world’s crazy enough to make both their heads spin.</p>
<p>The cake taste test can wait, anyway.</p>
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